Day: August 18, 2019

In just 16 days XKCD author Randall Munroe releases a new book titled How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems. He’s just released an excerpt from the chapter “How to Catch a Drone,” in which he actually enlisted the assistance of tennis star Serena Williams.

An anonymous reader writes:
Serena and her husband Alexis just happened to have a DJI Mavic Pro 2 with a broken camera — and Munroe asked her to try to smash it with tennis balls. “My tentative guess was that a champion player would have an accuracy ratio around 50 when serving, and take 5-7 tries to hit a drone from 40 feet. (Would a tennis ball even knock down a drone? Maybe it would just ricochet off and cause the drone to wobble! I had so many questions.)

“Alexis flew the drone over the net and hovered there, while Serena served from the

Original URL: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/gnzOsNs_0uk/xkcd-author-challenges-serena-williams-to-attack-a-drone

The company hopes doing so will let any developer deliver captions for long-form conversations. The source code is available now on GitHub.

Google released Live Transcribe in February. The tool uses machine learning algorithms to turn audio into real-time captions. Unlike Android’s upcoming Live Caption feature, Live Transcribe is a full-screen experience, uses your smartphone’s microphone (or an external microphone), and relies on the Google Cloud Speech API. Live Transcribe can caption real-time spoken words in over 70 languages and dialects. You can also type back into it — Live Transcribe is really a communication tool. The other main difference: Live Transcribe is available on 1.8 billion Android devices. (When Live Caption arrives later this year, it will only work on select Android Q devices.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original URL: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/XXJ00n-e13Y/google-open-sources-live-transcribes-speech-engine